Information Server 8.7 Extreme Productivity ... among other things

This past week I joined nearly 11,000 people who attended the Information on Demand (IOD) conference. What a fantastical week !!! Each day of the conference was filled with business and technical sessions, meeting with experts, customer interactions and more. It's always a very busy week trying to squeeze every minute out of these days. Needless to say, I slept quite a lot this past weekend :)

Now, if you didn't get to IOD last week or didn't see the announcement the week before, you may have missed the latest information for our newly released Information Server 8.7. I'm very excited about this release as it includes some particular features that will make a tremendous impact for our customers. As a matter of fact, many of the customers I met with at IOD who attended one of the "What's New" sessions or had the chance to work with the technology in the Demo Room commented that they will be starting their 8.7 upgrades asap in order to take advantage ot these new items.

So... what's new?

You can read the full details of "What's New" in our whitepaper of course, but let me highlight a few of my favorites in the following list. As you read through, I hope you get a sense of the priority we placed on productivity... solve tough challenges in intuitive ways that are then easy to use.

Operations Console - (my favorite) dashboard technology that puts all the answers of your runtime environment within a couple of clicks through our new web interface (pictured right). Start with summary graphs that provide rolled-up information across all your projects and then drill into the specifics based on your access permissions.

Interactive Parallel Debugger - accelerates the development lifecycle with an integrated troubleshooting framework. Run in a debug mode, pause on data conditions or record counts, investigate data values by node, etc.... What is truly market-unique about this technology is the ability to debug at any degree of parallelization across any SMP, MPP or Grid configuration.

New Netezza Connectivity - Information Server and Netezza now work together better than ever to deliver break-through analytics. You can read my blog for some other details, including some awesome benchmarks for reading and writing to Netezza

Information Analyzer Data Rules Stage - introduces a new stage to the DataStage/QualityStage job canvas to enable a shared rule framework between data profiling, data cleansing and data integration. Take the same insight the subject matter expert or business analyst built to monitor quality and use those rules to choose what data to remediate in your job flow. Or... flip that around and have your developers create the rules and then offer them to the data steward to apply for data quality monitoring.

QualityStage Match Specification Wizard - through a few simple selections, allows a user to very rapidly build solutions for the most common data quality use cases. I spoke to one of our 8.7 beta customers at IOD and he shared that a new hire of theirs fresh out of college was using this technology successfully within a day !!!!

Business Glossary Collaboration - really a phenomenal amount of advancement in one release .... integrated UI for all roles, new label construct for classification, logical model integration, and workflow/approval process for term authoring.

So... what now?

If these features sound interesting to you, you might be considering what are the next steps to find out more about Information Server or even to start your 8.7 journey. Here's some things you might consider:

If you want even more details on the specifics, take a look at our Information Center for 8.7 which has all of our product details (one of those things I like about IBM - it's always easy to find information about our products).

Reach out to your IBM Account team - always a good place to start for deep dives and next steps.

If you are ready to start your 8.7 install or upgrade, shoot a note to our Concierge team concis85@us.ibm.com who will provide best practice guidance as you go.

Or, shoot me an email.... tcurcio@us.ibm.com ... and I'd be happy to field any 8.7 questions of plug you into others who can get you started.